Today, we continue our discussion of ITIL, the IT Infrastructure Library, and describe which of its two components - service delivery and service support - is of primary interest to IT organizations.

The service support component is comprised of functions such as incident management, problem management, change management, configuration management and release management. The service delivery component is comprised of service level management, availability management, capacity management and IT service continuity management.

The five functions that have the widest current deployment are change management, incident management, problem management, service level management, and configuration management. Since four of these five belong to the service support component, it seems reasonable to conclude that service support is the most important component to IT organizations.

In our recent survey of 321 IT professionals, most of the respondents indicated that they are in the process of implementing capacity management, availability management, configuration management, IT service continuity management and service level management. Since four of these five functions belong to the service delivery component of ITIL, it seems reasonable to conclude that on a going-forward basis, the service delivery component is catching up with the service support component in terms of its importance to IT organizations.

As mentioned in the last newsletter, we would like to hear from you. If you have implemented ITIL, how well did that implementation go? If you looked at ITIL and decided to not use it, why did you make that decision?

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.